hpd-fotografy
FollowThe classical view of Hallstatt. Uploaded to the internet a million times (at least). So I asked myself, how can I possibly add something new? For starters, I c...
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The classical view of Hallstatt. Uploaded to the internet a million times (at least). So I asked myself, how can I possibly add something new? For starters, I came in winter, and (of course) I waited for my favorite light which is at blue hour, just when the city lights turn on. And then there was the ferry. I noticed the little ferry boat already during the day and thought its lights might provide nice trails during blue hour. So I studied the schedule and came back to the right place at the right time ...
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Behind The Lens
Location
This was taken in Hallstatt, at Lake Hallstatt in Austria, in the European Alpes.Time
I waited for my favorite light which is at blue hour, just when the city lights turn on.Lighting
The best light by far to catch the romantic, dreamy atmosphere of small mountain villages is at the end of the blue hour, when there is still enough light to see the details in the landscape but it's already dark enough so that the village lights have turned on.Equipment
For this photo session I used the mighty Nikon D810 with the classical Nikkor 14-24 mm f/2.8. All mounted on a sturdy tripod for the long exposures.Inspiration
The classical view of Hallstatt. Uploaded to the internet a million times (at least). So I asked myself, how can I possibly add something new? For starters, I came in winter, and at the end of the blue hour, just when the city lights turn on. And then there was the ferry. I noticed the little ferry boat already during the day and thought its lights might provide nice trails during blue hour. So I studied the schedule and came back to the right place at the right time.Editing
My post-processing workflow is all about quality and quite involved - especially for such an image wich is the merging of several long-exposures. Starting out with the best possible raw files I use DxO to convert the files into another raw format (.dng) using DxO's very good and gentle noise reduction and lens profile corrections for the particular camera-lens combination. Then I open all the .dng files in Lightroom and do 90% of the post-processing there, completely nondestructive, everything still in raw, and still working on the individual files - nothing merged yet. Then I synchronize all my Lightroom-edits between the individual dng-files.Then I open them as 16-bit tiff file-layers in Photoshop and merge them all together in some kind of average-calculation (thereby drastically reducing noise). Finally I apply some final touches (like a slight Orton effect, some filters from Nik and Topaz, etc.). Then I save the final 16-bit tiff and add it to my Lightroom library. Never, ever do I convert to jpg. A jpg file has only 8 bits of information-depth as compared to the 14 bits I started out with in raw. That is only a tiny fraction, namely 1/64th (or 1.56%) of the information I gathered with the camera (64 is 2 to the power of 6, and 6=14-8 is the difference in bit-depth between raw and jpg). Therefore, I do not consider jpgs a decent photo format worth having in my library. The only time I touch jpg is when I export something to upload to the web.In my camera bag
For over 30 years I have always used Nikon equipment, in the end the mighty D800 and later a D810, the classic Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens and the Nikon 85mm f/1.8 lens, a Nikon D750 and the Nikon 70-200 f/4. But since about 2 years I have sold all this and changed to Sony mirrorless and never looked back. I now have the Sony A7RII and the Sony A7II as cameras, the Sony-Zeiss 16-35 f/4 and 55 f/1.8 lens, the Sony 28 f/2 and 85 f/1.8 , and the ultrawide Voigtlaender 10mm f/5.6 VM.Feedback
Creating an image like that is quite a long and involved process. You need patience and persistence and stringent shooting discipline. It takes already over an hour to take all the long exposures at location - and all those exposure have to be exactly the same frame - no camera-shake whatsoever for over an hour! (remote shutter, time-delay, etc.). And the post-processing described above, first on each of the individual exposures and then on the combination of all those individual images into one master-image, takes many hours. People who don't believe in post-processing and think a photo has to be 'as it comes out of the camera' need not apply. Images like this do NOT just come 'out of the camera'.